It is becoming increasingly common to use a fire wall where client workstations in an organisation are connected to the Internet. Fire walls generally operate by shielding an organisation's network from certain data transmissions which have the potential to be harmful or disruptive to the organisation's activities.
Most fire walls achieve this task by accepting data in one of a finite set of protocols and rejecting data in any other protocol. It would be very useful for an organisation to expand the number of allowable protocols within an organisation network without compromising the safety or performance of that organisation's network.